


Rigid Designator

by ThetaSigma



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Humor, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 12:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21075065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThetaSigma/pseuds/ThetaSigma
Summary: In the many, many years they've been on Earth, Crowley and Aziraphale have heard many terms of endearments, but never angel. When they first do hear it as a term of endearment, they think little of it, but had it been given particular thought, they would have gone with human ingenuity. They were very wrong.Of course it's them who started it.





	Rigid Designator

**Author's Note:**

> For my sister, who is my muse. And all of this is always her fault anyway.

For the first over 5,000 years they lived on Earth, both Crowley and Aziraphale had heard many, many terms of endearment bandied about between lovers (or used to harass women. Seriously, that part never, ever changed). They had heard endless variations of sweetie, sweetheart, honey, dear, dearest, my darling, my love, my life, my desire, and so on, in dozens of languages, but never the word  _ angel _ .

Sometime in the late 1500s or early 1600s, though, they heard angel used as a term of endearment -- separately, because this was still the time when they met sporadically and clandestinely. Aziraphale heard a man extolling his love’s virtues to her, ending with, “Angel, I love you.”   
Crowley heard a man mutter it in another man’s ear at a secretive rendezvous,  _ “fuck angel you feel so good” _ .

Had either of them stopped to consider it, they would have assumed it was human ingenuity at work again. After all, human ingenuity had been responsible for a lot of things one or the other claimed to have done in their respective reports.

They were wrong.

***

_ London, 1587. _

They are at a showing of Marlowe’s  _ Tamburlaine the Great _ (part 1, it’s a play in two parts). Crowley is grumbling because he likes the  _ funny  _ ones. He’s made this plain since ancient Greece and Aristophenes  _ (Lysistrata  _ was one of his favorites). The place is absolutely packed, letting them hide among the crowd. It makes it look like they just  _ happened _ to run into each other, and of course, they’d have to keep a weather eye on their biggest adversary on Earth.

Aziraphale is delighted by the whole play, because of course he is. It’s exactly his type of thing -- grandiose and fussy. To be fair, Crowley does at least enjoy the intellectual complexity of it, but overall he’s not particularly a fan (the plays that would come only ten years later took the best parts of  _ Tamburlaine _ and left out much of what Crowley hates, but he has no way of knowing that this is coming. He’s a demon, not clairvoyant). 

Crowley loves how enthusiastic Aziraphale is, although he does his best to hide it. Aziraphale isn’t ready for that yet. They’ve finally hit the point where Aziraphale will admit they may just be friends, but the depth of Crowley’s love would lead to another 14th century incident, where Aziraphale fled and Crowley decided the only reasonable response was to sleep through an entire century. 

So he thanks his dark glasses for hiding the adoration in his eyes, and says, “Angel, if you enjoy this any more, they’ll think  _ you _ wrote it.”

Aziraphale flutters, clearly pleased but also a bit distressed anyone would think he wrote it. 

Had you asked Crowley or Aziraphale even two days later exactly what they had said to each other during the play, both would’ve drawn a blank. They’d remember the teasing, the usual banter, but nothing else.

A young man sitting behind them clearly hears Crowley call the man with him  _ ‘angel’ _ and reasonably does not guess it was a very literal description. He loves the endearment -- something new, something different. He vows then and there to use it.

Some days later, he does, calling his mistress  _ ‘angel’ _ as they walk together. She giggles happily, pleased beyond all measure by this new endearment.

A passer-by hears it and is equally struck by how lovely it is, and in this manner it spreads quickly. Not much later, it shows up in written word.

Aziraphale has a first edition copy of the book the use of angel as a description for a lovely person first appeared in, published around 1590. He has actually been part of linguistic debates as to how and when angel as a term for a lovely person began, and what had precipitated the change from “messenger of god” to this new meaning.

At the time, he doesn’t realise that he and Crowley are the reason. He doesn’t remember Crowley calling him angel in the theatre and has no particular reason to -- Crowley’s been calling him angel since the Garden of Eden.

It’s several more years post apocalypse before Aziraphale realizes that while he thought for millennia that Crowley was simply defining him (“you are an angel”), Crowley’s been using the word in its modern format for all those millennia (“you are  _ my _ angel”).

The second he realises, he goes straight to Crowley (currently threatening his plants). “You’ve  _ always _ meant I’m your angel,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley looks up from berating his hibiscus plant. He has no reply to this, because he’s not a big fan of stating the obvious, and everything else is intolerably rude.

“You’ve been calling me angel for  _ six thousand years _ , you started the trend of angel being an endearment, and dearest,  _ my love, _ I’ve never known. You weren’t saying I’m  _ an _ angel.”

Crowley only has one answer to that.  _ “Angel,” _ he whispers reverently, every ounce of love for his angel infused into that one word.

And this time Aziraphale hears it, hears it properly, along with every other ‘angel’ Crowley’s ever said to him.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is 100% my sister's fault. Most Good Omens fics I write are her fault. This one is specifically her fault because she texted me one day "omg what if angel is only a term of endearment because crowley calls aziraphale that?" so I told her "OMG WRITE THAT". But she's super busy and I am less so, so with her kind permission (and fervent encouragement), I have written the fic.
> 
> I also meant to dash this off as a quick cute just-so story, where someone overhears Crowley call Aziraphale angel and thinks it's adorable. This led to four hours of research about ancient forms of endearment in Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Egyptian, to name a few, then more modern forms in medieval French, English, and German, then a very long detour into English etymology on the word _angel_ and just when _exactly_ that term became used as an endearment or anything other than "messenger of God". As it turns out, the first recorded use was in 1590 or thereabout, so that part of the fic is actually very accurate. Google was very much my friend and also my enemy here. 
> 
> Marlowe's play _Tamburlaine_ is also accurate for the time and location, and, at least according to Wikipedia, did lead to the more Shakespearean dramas that came about 10-20 years later. It was also a tragedy, so Crowley probably wouldn't have liked it as much. (_Lysistrata_ would absolutely have been a favorite of his and you cannot tell me otherwise).
> 
> Lastly, the title is a bit unfair as it's mainly an inside joke, but avoiding the very inside-y parts, it's also a philosophical term (and where the inside joke comes from). In philosophy, a rigid designator is a theory about how names function, specifically that as opposed to imbuing any meaning, a name functions only to specifically point out a particular person or object (or, to, you know, _rigidly designate_ it. I think it's still funny even if you don't fully get the philosophical aspects, so I kept it. Feel free to let me know if it didn't work for you!


End file.
